Flatpak Firefox (and forks) very slow to start

SolarPunker@slrpnk.net to Linux@lemmy.ml – 40 points –

While other flatpak apps have no problems. Any suggestions?

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Distrobox will introduce a startup lag of it's own. I would rather recommend (seriously this time) something like nix (it is officially supported for your distro) or junest.

Nix might have been removed. I'll have to check, but I feel like the ujust command forv setting up nix went away a version or two ago.

But I think you can set distroboxes to run at startup, so you'd never know the difference when it came time to actually launch the program. Right (correct me if I'm wrong)?

Maybe, I do not use bazzite and cannot check. But it used to be a feature. You can, of cause, start distrobox at startup, but literally running almost two operation systems might not be the best for performance and RAM usage.

Could be a case for toolbox, which I admittedly know even less about. Either way, people here have offered several options to try!

Toolbox is effectively the same thing as distrobox. It is a linux distro inside docker-like container. They even use the same images.

Are there any processes in particular that I should keep an eye on? At the moment I don't notice any new particularly high load.

Fortunately, it does not usually cause high load, but it still exists. The only thing I can recomend here is to always check if the dependencies of any package you install in container require to run in the background and avoid those which do.

Is it? I was looking a few months ago at Nix support in Fedora Atomic (which Bazzite is based on), and it required some minor hacks to get the /nix folder and Nix itself working properly with rpm-ostree distros, as root is otherwise immutable. Plus, Nix isn't available by default in the Fedora repos it seems. I believe it required something along the lines of making a /var/nix folder and symlinking it, but I believe you'd also have to work around SELinux contexts on the folder and symlink. I've heard of people even having issues after that, so I wouldn't consider it "official" support. Here's an open issue thread about it

Well, I know it used to be available and officially supported through available installation script. I do not have bazzite installed right now and their website does not have a proper documentation, so I can not check if it is available now.

Oh thx for the info, I can maybe try with rpm-ostree in the case of lag. Nix is very good but I'm liking Bazzite very much for my needs, everything else seems working very good.

You don't quite understand me, it seems. I do not mean nixos distro. Nix is already available inside Bazzite as an additional package manager.

In fact I hadn't thought about it, I always tried Nix as a separate distribution.

Ok I'm writing this thru Firefox (distrobox) and it works pretty well, no lag noticed.

The lag would be noticeable when you launch Firefox with stopped container (for example after reboot or manual stop).

Ok, I've tested this, I've noticed a lag of a couple of seconds for the first time I launched a distroboxed app.

Sounds about in line with what I'd expect. If that works for you where the flatpak doesn't, then it at least makes a viable solution for the short term (though I don't know how much overhead would be introduced). A minute of delay is ridiculously long for startup, so I still don't know why you were having that issue with the flatpak